Akari Nakatani was born in Osaka, Japan in 1993 and is a Japanese YouTuber, actress, singer and cultural ambassador based in Vietnam.

Nakatani’s first interaction and introduction to Vietnam was through a Vietnamese international student named Phuc, while studying at 立命館アジア太平洋大学 (Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University). In a video explaining where and when she discovered Vietnam, she said that she used to be the type of person to take things for granted and complained about things she didn’t have, but meeting the student changed her perspective completely. The two eventually became good friends, and Akari would later visit Phuc and her family in Vietnam, where she would further fall in love with the food and the people.

During her final years of college, Akari would help Phuc open a Vietnamese restaurant in Japan. The restaurant would later be a huge success, but at the time, Akari was still stuck on what she wanted do with her life. Eventually, she decided to move to Vietnam, doing so in 2016 and starting a YouTube channel, while staying at another friend’s family’s place.

At first, Nakatani would believe the stay would be temporary, but it has been more than six years, and thus, Nakatani decided that she would permanently relocate to Vietnam. Eventually, her YouTube channel branched out to other types of videos aside from her experiences as a Japanese girl in Vietnam; these would include song covers, travel vlogs and helpful language guides.

In 2022, she would make her debut as an actress, staring in the movie Em Và Trịnh, which depicts the life story of Vietnam’s most famous activist and song-writer Trịnh Công Sơn, playing the role of Sơn’s Japanese lover Michiko Yoshii.